Iran: Is the US out of options?

Hitachi Energy is proud to partner with the foreign desk on Monaco Radio. Powering Purpose is a new book resulting from the partnership between Hitachi Energy and Monaco. It tells the story of the people and the technology leading the energy transition and ushering in a sustainable and secure future. Hitachi Energy and Monaco work together to provide inspiration on powering people's lives and where to find the energy for change in the era of electrification. Secure your copy now at monaco.com or in-store in Monaco outlets around the world. And if you want to understand the role you can play in harnessing connections to ensure a brighter, more sustainable and secure future, head to powering-purpose.com now. Hitachi Energy and Monaco, inspiring the energy for change. Six months and one day ago, the United States and Israel struck Iran. The beginning of what the US called Operation Epic Fury and Israel Operation Roaring Lion. Six months and one day later, the Endeavour has arguably not lived up to this heroic billing. The United States in particular is grappling once again with one of the supreme ironies of military conflict. I.e. that sending your troops into battle is a good deal easier than getting them back out. America's messaging during this period has been muddled. It is at this point far from clear what its objectives are or what its idea of victory would look like. When US President Donald Trump announced the commencement of hostilities on February 28th, he talked about preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, though he had previously claimed that the US had "totally obliterated Iran's nuclear program with earlier airstrikes in June 2025." Trump also rambled through a long list of malfeasances perpetrated by the Islamic Republic since its foundation in 1979. None of it inaccurate in fairness, but little of it persuasive that the account needed to be settled right now. Nevertheless, the idea seemed to be "bom Iran" luminates leadership, await the rising of a grateful people, and maybe who knows, the replacement of the Azadi Tower monument in Tehran with a golden statue of the man who made it all possible. Removing the present Iranian regime and/or reducing its chances of acquiring a nuclear weapon is not to be clear an ignoble ambition. The regime is at least as ghastly as Trump says it is. It has spent nearly half a century oppressing at home and terrorizing abroad. But in war, as was once leconically noted by Trump's first Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, the enemy gets a vote. Iran, having spent decades preparing for this moment, has cast its lot by battering America's allies in the Gulf and effectively seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf, and the route by which maybe a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied gas gets, or used to get, to market. Is any kind of military victory still possible? Does the U.S. have any other good options, or is Hormuz America's Suez? This is the foreign desk. Iran has threatened to attack the Gulf Arab states many times in the past, if it was attacked by the United States, and it was, and it did. And once that red line is crossed, it makes it easier for Tehran to do it in the future, and I think that's a really frightening prospect for the Gulf Arab states. We have to be very careful, re-igniting major combat operations, unless we want to just fight through the pain of our air partners getting hammered. I think we maybe have moved beyond a rupture in American foreign policy, to the point where we have to entertain the notion that the American century is coming to an end. You're listening to the foreign desk with me, Andrew Muller. Now, first guest is Dina Esfandiari, Middle East Geo-economics lead for Bloomberg Economics. Dina, first of all, we are six months or so into this endeavour that the United States launched with Israel back in February. At this point, will Iran basically be thinking we've won? I don't think they'll be thinking we've won, but I do think they'll be thinking that they have made some serious strategic gains as a result of this war. They've also had to endure a lot of hardship, a lot of destruction, a pretty hefty war-related cost for their economy and the cost of rebuilding afterwards. But for sure, they'll feel as though they would stood an attack by a far superior enemy, in fact two far superior enemies. And as a result of the war, they've been able to exert some form of control over the strait of Hormuz, a level of control or coordination that I think is likely to endure even after this war. Well, this is kind of what we wanted to get into, because we have seen this week Iran claiming that it has agreed a deal with Oman about administering the strait of Hormuz and perhaps even imposing some sort of toll and dividing it between them. Though the Omanis are being notably quiet about this, can Iran actually legally assert control over the strait of Hormuz? It's supposed to be international waters, isn't it? So I don't know, I'm not a legal scholar, I won't be able to answer the legal question, but what I can say is that geography is really hard to ignore. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter legally what Iran can and can't do if somebody can't force them to open it, and the United States sure as hell has tried, then ultimately Iran will continue to do what it's doing. I think over the long term though, we have to understand that it's not really Iran's interest to completely close off the strait. What Iran wants to do is ensure that the international community recognizes that some level of coordination with it at the very least is going to be necessary in order for it to open the strait. It's more an issue of ensuring that everyone knows that Iran's in control. The issue of tolling, I think it's interesting. I think the Iranians are pushing to see what they can get away with, and again, keep in mind this war has been costly for it, so this will help towards that cost, although it won't be anywhere near enough what Iran needs. So Tehran may call it something else, but I think ultimately yes it's going to be pushing for some kind of financial, I guess you could call it a reward as a result of controlling the strait. Similarly, ultimately though, the reopening of the strait of Hormuz would be in Iran's interests as well, because it does rely on those straits to get things in and out, at least to an extent. With that thought in mind, is there a possibility, and this may seem absurdly optimistic, that Iranian having de facto control over Hormuz actually wouldn't matter all that much. In 1956, we saw the United Kingdom, France and Israel go to war at least part in the belief that Egypt controlling the Suez Canal would be the end of the world as we knew it, and it turned out it wasn't really. Secondly, there's definitely something to be said for Iran wanting the strait to be open. It also doesn't want to overuse this card it has right now, because the longer it keeps it closed, the longer other countries have an incentive to look for ways around the strait of Hormuz to build alternative routes out of the strait, either by land or by having, for example, oil storage built abroad. All of this will diminish the weight, the importance of this strategic game that Iran has made as a result of this war. So, from Tehran's perspective, there's also an incentive to resolving this as soon as possible to shore to maintain its grip over the strait, but if it does maintain that grip, then understanding that Tehran also needs it open. It doesn't want to close it permanently. It needs to get its stuff out, but also it doesn't want to encourage other countries to find ways around it, because that would diminish its leverage over time. Well, among those countries, obviously, are the Gulf states north of the strait of Hormuz, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar? Are they now effectively, and will Iran be thinking of this as perhaps another strategic gain? Are they effectively now to an extent hostages of Tehran? I think that for sure a red line has been crossed. Iran has threatened to attack the Gulf Arab states many times in the past, and threatened to drag them into a war if it was attacked by the United States. It was, and it did, and once that red line has crossed, it makes it easier for Tehran to do it in the future, and I think that's a really frightening prospect for the Gulf Arab states. And on top of that, you're going to end up as a result of this war with an Iran that is weakened, but also embittered, but also emboldened oddly because it feels confident, because of these strategic gains that it's made, because of its ability to withstand US attacks and still be standing at the end. And that's a pretty dangerous scary combination. The Gulf Arab states depend on stability for their prosperity, for their booming economies, and if they can't return to normal, which doesn't really stand out. likely at the moment, then that's going to have some serious long-term effects on them. So is there an argument, and bearing in mind that one of the rationales advanced for this escapade back in February, that it would prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, that the United States and Israel have inadvertently given Iran something even better than a nuclear weapon, which is the fact that now everybody knows not only that Iran could or can close the straight and fall moves, it knows that Iran, in certain circumstances, will do that. Absolutely. In other words, Iran's threat is now credible. In the past, it was an abstract threat. It was a threat that people had to reckon with, that people were gained, that the policy community thought maybe, maybe not today, it happened, and it's likely to happen again. Again, keep in mind, every time Iran does it, it diminishes its leverage over the long-term, but for now, its leverage, its leverage that it will continue to use. Every time Iran feels cornered, it will turn to the straight. Every time it feels cornered, it might turn around and attack infrastructure in neighboring countries because it's done it before. And so the cost, yes, it's high, but it's a cost it's already born, so it's not that high for Tehran ultimately in the long run. Well, just finally then, and with all due acknowledgement that there may not be a simple answer to this question, it's the question of who in Iran now is actually deciding whether and when to apply that leverage. Do we actually understand who is making the decisions? I don't think it's any single individual. I think the decision-making apparatus in Iran has changed a little bit as a result of this war. Prior to the war, we had one big decision-maker. We had the Supreme Leader, there was always debate, there was always discussion within the Iranian system, but ultimately the final decision was made by the Supreme Leader. Today, I think it's a little bit different. I think individuals, groups like the Revolutionary Guards have been elevated as the result of this war. And so now the decision-making process is probably more egalitarian. It's also why you're seeing a great deal of debate. I think there is generally unity behind the need for Iran to continue to withstand and be strong as a result of this war. There's a lot of debate about how to achieve that. Some people are more in favor of diplomacy within the Iranian system. Others more in favor of continuing to instrumentalize their hold on the straight-up hormones. But that debate, again, within the Islamic Republic is normal. It's always been like that. I really think the difference now is there's not just one decision-maker, there are several decision-makers, and all of them kind of have to come together to decide what Iran's going to do next. That was Dina Esfandiari, Middle East Geo-economics lead for Bloomberg Economics. This is the foreign desk with me, Andrew Muller, when the U.S. and Israel first struck Iran in February, the idea appeared to be a short, sharp, and decisive shock akin to the operation which snatched Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas in January. Iran, however, seems to have been less surprised by American intervention than Venezuela was. Joining us now is former U.S. Navy officer Rirad Moral Mark Montgomery, now senior fellow at the foundation for the defensive democracies. Admiral, first of all, I believe I'm right in saying that you have direct experience of escorting tankers in and out of the Persian Gulf. You did this in the late 1980s during the Iran Iraq War. But how different a task would that be for the U.S. Navy now, given the way that technology has changed since then? Look, it's going to be drastically different. When I escorted through, I was a junior officer on a ship escorting ships through the two threats were mines and anti-ship cruise missiles, kind of Soviet era, anti-ship cruise missiles that the Iranians had. There was an air defense challenge there, but very manageable, you wouldn't be overwhelmed in numbers. And the mines, I mean, I was in a minefield twice, so I mean, we did run into mines kind of frequently then. And mines, we'd be technology is evolved, but still a lot of it's still the same basic techniques. So that's how we were then. Today, my sons, Navy, it's much different. They've got a deal with different types of interceptors, long-range drones like Shahed's, short-range one-way drones that are very small weapons, but still can get through as well as the anti-ship cruise missiles. They had the same mine issue, and then they have to add in also small boat attacks, although those have been knocked down pretty heavily now. And so as a result, we would have never considered using that southern Omani route that's being used right now, but that's a smart move because it gives you the one thing that gives you protection, and that's a little bit of strategic distance. In other words, 60 kilometers instead of 30 kilometers to launch sites, that gives you more time to respond. Certainly for the small boat attacks, it gives time for your armed helicopters and ATNs to remove them from the field. So from my perspective, it's a much harder mission than it's required some more innovative thinking. So as things are now, if the United States Navy was ordered to force hall moves open and keep it open, can it actually do that? I think it can. The challenge is, and there's a couple US nations ships have done back and forth transit with their weapon systems on, and they've been shot at, and they've shot everything down that was fired at them. And we've done mine clearance what are called Q routes, quick routes that made sure that Omani path was free, and that's what Admiral Cooper keeps saying, like I've cleared routes in the center of her moves, and then President Trump says, you know, factually and accurately, that we've swept all the mines, that's not true. So if we were to do it today, we would have to have two US Navy ships with three to four very large crew carriers, there's big two million barrel crew carriers between them. We would have, what we have already, which is the aircraft overhead, that's what's protecting the ships today, is three to four sets of aircraft overhead that can shoot down drones and missiles, the ships to protect against the drones and missiles that get too close, and then the armed helicopters. You could do that. The US Navy would say the risk is okay for that. The merchant ships are nervous about that. They're nervous about being tied to the US Navy ships getting large numbers of weapons fired at them, and thinking the US Navy may not be able to defend them, and, you know, they're allowed to have that opinion. I mean, it's their vessel and their load, but I would just say it's executable. The risk would get higher, but you could do it. One thing I'd add is, those small bombing campaigns we did during the ceasefire, but you know, just 200 today or 150 day, those were aimed at the radars and becoding systems on the small islands in the strait, and along the Iranian coastline, which has made it a lot harder for the Iranians to target shipping, but that stuff will regenerate. That's not expensive. It's not technology-challenging, so they're regenerating that, so we're going to have to re-strike it, I think, before we started escorting ships through. I mean, there's been various other ideas advanced, some by President Trump, some by people surrounding him about perhaps more decisive and dramatic military interventions, whether it's seizing the port at Bandar Abbas, putting the Marines ashore on Carg Island. Do any of those strike you as even vaguely plausible? No. You know, part of my job is I spend a couple months of year training Ukrainian army units, and so I'm reasonably close to the front lines there routinely, and I see the impact of one-way attract tax drones. Ukraine and Russia have developed affected defenses against some of those one-way attract drones with jamming and counter drone systems. We have none of that. I mean, we have very limited jamming, no ground-based, you know, mobile counter drone systems. So if we went, we can seize land, we can seize it and destroy it, but we need to leave within a day or two. If we seize and hold Carg Island or piece of Iranian coastline, our troops are going to be hammered by one-way attract drones, and we're not going to be able to defend ourselves. And if you watch, you know, Ukrainian film of Russians out in the field getting hit with drones, you don't want to see that with US troops, and that's what we would get. So the president is off completely off-base and saying he might do that other than as a faint, you know, where he says he's going to do it when he has no intention to. I mean, is the US military, though, further circumscribed by whatever damage has been done to US facilities in the Gulf in the last six months, granted that everybody's been very vague about what that damage amounts to, but it's not like there's been no damage. No, you're right. So what I would say is that the US facilities now have strategic depth. We've moved effectively from Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait to Israel, Jordan, and Western Saudi Arabia. And so we've gotten strategic depth for our military forces, but you can't move the critical infrastructure of our Arab partners, their desalination plans, their power grids, their fossil fuel production facilities. And those are at risk from uh, shahed type drones and ballistic missiles. We can shoot down the ballistic missiles, but the shahed drones, we can't get at them because we don't have the ground-based interceptors that say Ukraine has 20 plus varieties of. So until we've brought, and I know our air partners are buying these things hand over fist right now, but until we've got enough of those in-country and securely efficiently operating, we have to be very careful reigniting major combat operations, unless we want to just fight through the pain of our air partners getting hammered. I mean, do you think there are questions about the long-term viability, though, of some of those especially important US facilities in the Gulf, thinking obviously of St Com in Qatar and the US Navy's fifth fleet in Bahrain? Are those still going to be viable outposts? Yeah, so I think our Air Force Operation Center, which is in Qatar, will probably permanently move. If I were to pick the place to put it, I'd put it in Israel, that may not be what the politically the move they can do. And the maritime facility can be anywhere. The maritime facility can be in Tampa. That's where Central Command fights the war from. And the ground-based one in Qatar, you still need legit logisticians, but I would move them back to Jordan and then and do it from there. So I mean, there's lots of options here. It was a mistake to not over the last two to three years as you saw the evolution as you had on the Ukrainian battlefield. It was a mistake not to reduce our footprint in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. And eastern Saudi Arabia, Prince Sultan Air Base, and move to the western parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Well, just finally then, and I guess trying to find a way to sum all that up, does the United States from where we are now six months into this actually have any good military options as such? I mean, if you're willing to take pain, you can resume full-scale combat operations. Look, I think the best option we have is the black aid. It's effective. Right now, Iran is losing its ability to pump and ship fossil fuels. They could do a small percentage to tank or truck through the Kyber Pass. The reality is you need these large maritime two-million-barrow-day ships going out there through what was called the Iranian, their shadow fleet, and illegally being refined in China and India and Teapot refineries. We're stopping that. I mean, a ship may get through once in a while, but 90, 95 percent is being stopped. That's effectively squeezing their economy. That's the best military tool we have. After that, I would say our ability to open up the southern part of the strait with aircraft overhead to allow a reasonable amount of oil to float through is the second one. If we try to do major combat operations again, though, I think there's going to be some damage done to Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. That was Rirad-Nural Mark Montgomery, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies. You're listening to the foreign desk. This is the foreign desk on Monaco Radio. If the United States hasn't won in Iran and can't win in Iran, what can it do? Joining us finally is Stephen Wertheim, Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quinty Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Tomorrow the World, the birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Stephen, first of all, we've seen the U.S. find out more than once over the last half century or so that wars are a great deal easier to start than stop. Is it therefore possible that we are now only at the beginning of something that could conceivably grind on as long as Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam? It is possible and as a general matter, many wars either conclude quickly or drag on for quite a while. We've seen that with Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. However, well, it's absolutely the case that the United States is once again relearning the lesson that it is so much easier to start a war than to end one on anything like satisfactory terms. This situation is so tenuous and there's so much at stake for both sides that I don't know whether the war can go on as something that we'd call a war for too much longer. And in particular, what I worry about are the Iranians deciding to escalate if they are feeling the pinch and that will put a lot of pressure on President Trump to revisit his options and look at escaping the situation either by escalating back to war or by returning to something like the memorandum of understanding arrangement that was recently concluded but fell apart. Because this is not now a danger as well and again, this has happened before that the United States will end up feeling obliged to stay the course in a more or less hopeless cause because it's concerned about its credibility. I mean, again, there's something of a parallel here. It strikes me with Vietnam which ground on and on and on far past the point at which anybody seriously thought the United States could win just because everybody thought it would make the United States look weak if the United States decided, okay, we give up, we're going home. That's right. All the elements from prior wars that have caused the United States to throw good money and good people after bad, they're present in this war. For example, President Trump wants something, even though he can seemingly spin any reality into whatever he wants, he still wants something that will burnish his legacy that he can say with some kind of plausible relationship to reality was a success. In fact, that's one of the reasons he launched this war. He was looking to his legacy. He felt emboldened after his operational success in Venezuela. He got convinced that a quick and pretty payless war could remove the regime or cause it to cry uncle as some of his staff has have said. So that same pride or hubris remains in the same man and makes it really hard, I think, for him to take the criticism that he got when he seemed to be fighting an exit with the memorandum of understanding where people, including in his party, were pointing out just how much worse the United States is after the war that it was going into it. And then there's this broader concern, as you mentioned, which is a long standing one about America's reputation, its prestige, its credibility. Interestingly enough, that is not something that Donald Trump seems to care about. He has such an unconventional view of what makes for American power in the eyes of the world. So in this case, he personally may not care about that. But in fact, America's depletion of its high-end munitions stocks and its concerns to the extent it has them under this administration about the confidence of allies and deterrence of adversaries may work in the other direction to keep United States from pursuing escalation because it is already so depleted that there are serious concerns I have and many people do about the extent to which the United States has a plausible way to fight a war against China. For example, should it move on Taiwan? And it's going to affect Ukraine's ability to have interceptors as well. I mean, a few years back, you wrote a book called Tomorrow the World, which was about the birth of the United States global supremacy, which is the state of affairs that most people listening to this have lived under all their lives. Isn't too much of a reach to suggest that we might be witnessing the beginning of the end of that? I have so resisted this kind of analysis, which has been constant ever since Donald Trump emerged as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2016. But I think you have to ask the question now. I think we maybe have moved beyond disruption, a rupture in American foreign policy, to the point where we have to entertain the notion that the American century, which the life magazine publisher Henry Luce wrote about famously in February of 1941, is coming to an end. And I was recently reading that essay actually. And Luce talks about the United States acting as the good Samaritan of the world. He has a real kind of win-win quality to America's engagement in world affairs, remarkably in the midst of a war in which the acts of powers were on the move that America wasn't even in the war, loses envisioning a post-war one-world unified looking to America for leadership. And at the very least, that's not how the United States is seeing itself and its role in the world anymore. You could say perhaps Joe Biden still had that notion. But after Trump has secured a second victory, had two terms and become the defining figure of at least half of the country's politics, I'm not even sure that the next Democrat will look at the world in this way, added to which, of course, the world is looking so differently. It's just incredible the drop in approval and trust in the United States, including relative to China that has occurred swiftly in this second Trump term. This doesn't mean that the United States will have no power and will have no influence for sure, but I think it's going to be the United States coming to terms with a very contested role in the world and having to be much more focused and disciplined about the use of power, or also will have yet punished for it, and I think it's getting punished for it right now. Just finally then, and to bring it back to the situation in the Persian Gulf six months in, and as you see it, by the terms that the United States set out at the start of this adventure to deprive the Islamic Republic of the ability to build a nuclear weapon to remove the Islamic Republic's regime and ideally to encourage the Iranian people to rise up and replace this regime with something better, does the United States have a good option available to it? Yes, there's a good option available. I mean, there's a less bad option available, I should say, and that is to conclude the best deal it can get, or to walk away from the situation. The good news, or again the less bad news, is that Iran will still have a lot of trouble reconstituting its nuclear program, and as Trump himself has pointed out from early on in the conflict, the United States has the ability to monitor what Iran is doing, and potentially strike again if it sees movement around the facilities that the United States bombed last year. So the scenario that has been treated as a catastrophic scenario by the American political system for some time that is Iran getting a nuclear weapon still is not one that Trump has to concede whatsoever, in fact, I still think that if he is willing to contemplate significant sanctions relief for Iran, work something out over the Strait of Hormuz, that the Iranians would be willing to submit to some kind of inspections regime, and that we could have a lot more confidence that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But the war has not achieved much of anything aside from destroying the mighty Iranian Navy, which I don't know about you, was not something that I thought about when I went to bed at night. So it's just impossible for me to figure out any kind of strategic gain that the United States has made out of this war, but this dilemma is exactly how we get a forever war, that the President wants to show some kind of gain, and we'll keep trying and trying and trying in the hopes that something somehow will happen, that will allow him to say that he's accomplished something significant, and that's really a hopeless in search of a strategy. That was Stephen Wertheim, Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and author of Tomorrow The World, this is The Foreign Desk. That's it for this episode of The Foreign Desk, we'll be back next week and look out for The Foreign Desk Explainer, available every Wednesday. The Foreign Desk was produced by Anita Riyota and Liliostin, Lili also produces The Foreign Desk Explainer. To contact The Foreign Desk team, you can email Anita at [email protected] and don't forget to subscribe to Monical Magazine and to our free daily email bulletins by heading to our website at monical.com. For me, Andrew Muller, thank you very much for listening, until next time, goodbye.